Having once put
his hand to the plough of action, with clear foresight, not blindfold
bravery, his language is--'Though I indulge no more the dream of
living, as I hoped I might have lived, a life of temperate and
thoughtful joy, yet I repine not, and from this time forth will cast
no look behind.' The first part of the drama leaves him an exultant
victor, an honourable prosperous, and happy man. The second
part--which alike in interest and treatment is very inferior to the
first--finds him falling, and leaves him 'fallen, fallen, fallen, from
his high estate.' His sun, no longer trailing clouds of glory, sets in
a wintry and misty gloom. And yet in the act of dying he emits flashes
of the ancient brightness, and we feel that so dies a hero. The other
_dramatis personae_ pale their ineffectual fires before his central
light.
After a silence of nearly ten years--characteristic of Mr Taylor's
deliberative and disciplined mind--he produced (1842) _Edwin the
Fair_, of whose story the little that was known, he observes, was
romantic enough to have impressed itself on the popular memory--the
tale of _Edwy and Elgiva_ having been current in the nursery long
before it came to be studied as a historical question.
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